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  • MacDougall, David. 1998. "Beyond Observational Cinema." in Transcultural Cinema

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    Gleice Bueno
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    Capítulo 4 de Transcultural Cinema

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    MacDougall, David. 1998. “Beyond Observational Cinema.” In Transcultural Cinema

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    Capítulo 4 de Transcultural Cinema

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF or read online from Scribd
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    18 views36 pages

    MacDougall, David. 1998. "Beyond Observational Cinema." in Transcultural Cinema

    Uploaded by

    Gleice Bueno
    Capítulo 4 de Transcultural Cinema

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF or read online from Scribd
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    of 36
    CHAPTER FOUR Beyond Observational Cinema ‘Truth is not a Holy Grail to be won: itis a shutle Which moves ceaselessly between the observer and the observed, between science and reality Edgar Morin! ‘Tit Past FEW YEARS have seen a recommitment to the principle of obser- vation in documentary filmmaking. The result has been fresh interest in the documentary film and a body of work that has separated itself clearly from the traditions of Grierson and Vertov.? Audiences have had restored to them the sense of wonder at witnessing the spontaneity of life that they felt in the early {days of the cinema, seeing a train rush into the Gare de La Ciotat. This has not been a response to the perfection of some new illusion, but to a fundamental change in the relationship that filmmakers have sought to establish between their subjects and the viewer. The significance of that relationship for the practice of social science is now felt as a major force in the ethnographie film, ‘This would seem an appropriate moment to discuss the implications of obser- vational cinema as a mode of human inguiry. In the past, anthropologists were accustomed to taking their colleagues* «descriptions on faith. It was rare o know more about a remote society than the ew persons who had studied it, and one accepted their analyses largely be- ‘cause one accepted the scholarly tradition that had produced them, Few mono- graphs offered precise methodological information or substantial texts as doc- tumentary evidence in support of their claims. Ethnographic films were rarely more liberal in this regard. The prevailing siyle of filming and film editing tended to break 2 continuum of events into mere illustrative fragments. On top of this, ethnographic filmmaking was a haphazard affair. It was never employed systematically or enthusiastically by the anthropological profession as a whole, Moana (1926) was the work of Robert Flaherty, a geologist and explorer, Grass (1925) of adventurers who later went on to make King Kong (1933). Until very recently most ethno- ‘Braphic films were the byproducts of other endeavors: the chronicles of travel- crs, the works of documentary filmmakers, and the occasional forays into film of anthropologists whose major commitment was to writing. In most cases these films announced their own inadequacies. When they did not, neither 16 sere they wholly persuasive. On ot onsiad were they willy persuasive, Onc oen wondered what ha fen conee sd bythe cing, he amigo tema canmenag at 2 ns such an Tn Marshal's The Hunters (1988) ef impor- tant reas of dott. Could ane accept that this was how the Suomi Kala condited long hun, gen the at hat thm wan come os seis of shorter ones? In Reber Gardner's Dead Bins (196), could on confident thatthe thoughts attibued tothe they mle Soca to the subjects were what they migha tn 2H 38H cthnographic Hlmmakers have looked for Slaton to such Broblems. abd nsw eppoaches to documenay filming in Westy soce have provided most of them. By focusing on dice evens ere oh Stet cones or inpeson n by sakng render aly the mat sind sect, nd dation fevers have ped to pve the ewer wth iin evidecs to judge tei’ lger alysis shall’ An Argument about a Me all's wich as Mantas fariage (1969), Roger Sandal’ Ea ilar Rar 1369), and ity Asch's The Fest 190) al carly allempts of this kind. They are “observational” bene ‘ming. placing the viewer in the role of an oberven wines Ty av eset every rer han laste er thy expos sb aia or thu, Tey ae nevertiles,evidene of what be mer “To those of usw and ese ws who began making ethnographic fas when inna ve snerican “ditet cinema” were revolitoning + Slatin, 1s app ming ter secs eon ao eae for socal science appeare iran he for seal scene peared so obo tha i fie ound th ‘eapumeaied cil. Why, we often wonderin ning ot e world’s fast-changing cultures, had anhropot iss rather than journalists who Bt conceived of such eh strugsled for its perfection? enn The observational directo rection in etn cits tr wographic fkmmaking. hed, after Sexi vgwosycoigh The very smi af eens a pore te dese ose mre psy he al mn of simals, starting with the chrenoph ba phe graphy of ead ayiiee (857 nd Boe hs Mey 0) the 1870s and 188002 Se s-Louis Regnaut and Waller Baldwin Spencer gut went beyond the popular interests of Lume making eswntaly cheers, ional film records of technology and tual in-non-Westem socistos Flaery’s work, for al its reflection of his own ialism, was rose ara carl exploration of her people's ines. I bealed the achive of filmmakers as Merin C, Cooper and Emest Schocdack, ann a : and New Guinea, From the the ethnographic fim el heir tothe fragmentation ef nmceey eon BEYOND ORSERVATIONAL CINEMAS 7 nwa and that began to dominate the documentary film nated in the Soviet c with the coming of sound It could be said that the notion of the synchronous-sound ethnographic film vas bor at the moment Walter Baldwin Spencer decided to take both an Edison cylinder recorder and a Warwick camera to Central Australia in 1901. It became a practical possibility in the late 1920s, only to be neglected in documentary films until the 1950s. In 1935 Arthur Elton and Edgar Anstey ‘demonstrated what could have been done more widely by taking sound cam- cras, bulky as they then were, into the slums of Stepney and documenting the lives of the inhabitants.* To say that they were ahead of their time is only to note with regret that they should not have been. ‘When highly portable synchronous-sound cameras were finally developed around 1960, few ethnographic filmmakers jumped at the chance to use them as though long awaiting the event. Two exceptions were Jean Rouch in France ‘and John Marshall in the United States. Rouch’s work was to have a major influence on both fiction and documentary filmmaking in Europe. Marshall had already practiced makeshift kind of synchronous-sound filming in the 1950s among the Ju/hoansi. His observational approach foreshadowed the discoveries of the Drew Associates group and the National Film Board of ‘Canada in North Ametica, although the originality of his early work only be came evident with the release, long after The Humers, of his shorter films from the Peabody-Harvard-Kalahari expeditions, Filmmakers who followed an observational approach quickly divided along methodological lines. Unlike the followers of Rouch, those in the English- speaking world were hesitant to interact with their subjects on film, except ‘occasionally to interview them, Their adherence to this prineiple had an al- most religious asceticism, distinct from the speculative approach of Rouch ‘and other European filmmakers. It is this self-denying tendency of modern observational cinema that T should like to examine. Ibis the tradition in which I was trained, and it has an ‘obvious affinity to certain classical notions of scientific method. But this very orthodoxy could well make it a dangerously narrow model for ethnographic filmmakers of the future. Many of us who began applying an observational approach to ethnographic filmmaking found ourselves taking as our model not the documentary film as ‘we had come to know it since Grierson, but the dramatic fiction film, in al its ineamations from Tokyo to Hollywood. This paradox resulted from the fact that of the two, the fiction film was the more observational in attitude. Docu entaries of the previous thirty years had celebrated the sensibility of the filmmaker in confronting reality: they had rarely explored the flow of actual ‘events, Although this style had produced such masterpieces as Basil Wright's Song of Ceylon (1934) and Willard Van Dyke and Ralph Steiner's The City ps ranrrwo (1939), it was a style of synthesis, a style that used imaxes to develop an argument or impression Each of the discrete images in such documentaries was the bearer of a pre- determined meaning. They were often articulated like the images of juxtaposed against an asynchronous sound track of music or commer deed, poetry was sometimes integral to the film's conception, as in Pare Lorentz's The River (1937), Basil Wright and Harry Wat's Night Mail (1936), and Alberto Cavalcanti’s Coalface (1936), In contrast to this iconographic approach, the images of the fiction film were largely anecdotal. They were the pieces of evidence from which one deduced a story. The audience was told little. It was presented with. contiguous events. It leamed by observing. It seemed that such a relationship between viewer and subject should be Possible with materials found in the real world. In our own society this had indeed become the approach of filmmakers such as Richard Leacock and Al- bert and David Maysles, who were fond of quoting Tolstoy's declaration that the cinema would make the invention of stories unnecessary. For those of ts interested in filming outside our own society, the fils of the lalian Neoreal. ists, with their emphasis upon the economic and social enviroament, seemed like mirror-images of the films we hoped could be made from real events in the ongoing lives of other peoples. ‘The classical voice of the fiction film is the third person: the camera ob- serves the actions of the characters not as a participant but as an invisible Presence, capable of assuming a variety of positions, To approximate such an approach in the nonfiction film, filmmakers must find ways of making them selves privy to human events without disturbing them. This is relatively easy when the event attracts more attention than the eamera—what Edgar Morin has called “intensive sociality” (de Heusch 1962; 4). It becomes more difficult when a few people are interacting in an informal situation. Yet documentary filmmakers have been so successful in achieving a sense of unobirusivences that scenes of the most intimate nature have been recorded without apparent ‘embarrassment or pretense on the part of the subjects, The usual practice iso spend so much time with one’s subjects that they lose interest in the camera, They must finally go on with their lives, and they tend to do so in their accus. tomed ways. This may scem improbable to those who hav yet to filmmakers itis a familiar phenomenon, T have often been struck in my own work by the readiness of people to accept being filmed, even in societies where one might expect a camera to be Particularly threatening. This acceptance is of course aided by de-emphasizing the actual process of filming, in both one’s manner and one’s technique While making To Live with Herds (1972) among the Jie of Uganda, | used camera brace that allowed me to keep the camera in the filming position for twelve or more hours a day, over a period of many weeks. I lived looking through the viewfinder, Because the camera ran noiselessly, my subjects soon a poem, tary, In: a series of fe not witnessed it, ‘Whoa the end of my say, [took out sl camera, vero ear sign that they recognized this as essentially different from posing—a clear sign that cinema. : T would suggest that at time filmed than in the presence of cra has an obvious job to do, gave up trying to decide wl Js people can behave mere aaaly while being “Wicking of ebserver. A person wth a= wach hoa The sah ost is

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